Does anyone still have their very first DVD backup?

[MaximRecoil]

I was looking through my files today and came across the very first backup I ever made of a DVD, which I did as a DivX AVI that would fit on one CD, dated November 6, 2002. I remember asking some of my computer savvy friends about doing such things and they always brushed it off as being far too complex and time consuming to even bother with. So I did a Google search and the very first guide I came across looked good to me and I set out to follow it line for line. I don't still have the guide but I remember the programs it specified.

FlaskMPEG .78.39 Beta
DivX 5.02
Fraunhofer MP3 Codec Pro v1.263
Adaptec ASPI XP 4.71.1
cladDVD XP v1.3

I didn't really understand anything that was going on as I was following the guide but looking back at the results, the file wasn't half bad. It is good quality and very watchable. The task seemed enormous at the time and I remember thinking to myself, "There is no way that this is actually going to work, and if it does, I'll probably never get it to work again."

Like I said, the encode is decent enough. As luck would have it, I picked a short movie for my first encode (85 minutes) so that helped. I see that the frame rate is 23.976 FPS so apparently FlaskMPEG beta IVTC'd it automatically, even though I didn't know anything about that at the time. I sort of just winged it in the resize/crop area of Flask but it came out to a good aspect ratio (544x304 which as it turned out is a common size to use for 16:9 or 1.85:1 sources); and cropped neatly with no left-over parts of the black bars or overscan areas on the sides. I suspect that FlaskMPEG was forcing some parameters to keep a novice from monkeying that part up too badly. It was a single pass encode and it went fairly quickly (under 2 hours; I was expecting 20+ hour encode times from what I had heard from my brother's attempts at such things on his old Pentium II in the late 90's). The bitrate came out to 938 kbps and I used 128 kbps MP3 audio as suggested in the guide. The file size came out to 651 MB which is 49 MB light; not sure why unless maybe that version of FlaskMPEG had a bitrate calculator and it was set to a single 650 MB CD instead of a 700 MB one? I can't remember now.

I remember thinking at the time, when I had seen the results which I was very pleased with; that I must have stumbled across the definitive method of encoding DVD's to AVI, lol.

My first venture into this sort of thing probably seems pretty mundane compared to what some of the pioneers on this board went through; which is fine, as I am hoping to hear some better stories than my own; if anyone has the time to tell about it.

[Koti]

1st backup - Logans Run - 09-12-02 -
Divx 5.01 - GK 0.26.1

A friend had told me about Gordian Knot and Doom9, so off I went armed with my new AMD 1500+ PC I just built.
Not having much PC experiance and bored to death with a broken leg I typed Doom9 into search and downloaded GK , Divx and printed a pile of how to guides.

The next day I was ready to tackle this amazing task.

1st off installing GK was a bit of fun. ( 0.21 + 0.26update + 0.26.1.exe patch was a bit complex to this n00b )

Step by step I went (guide in hand for educated guessing) ripping , preparing , selecting audio and rate , cropping , resizing , filtering , setting divx codec options.

Finally it was time to hit encode now. With apprehension I pressed the yes button and off it went. Many hours later it was done , a 699mb .avi file. I opened and played the file , Wow !! This is amazing I thought , It worked perfectly.

Many thanks to Doom9 , TheWEF (for the original GK) and Everyone who has helped in any way past and present :) :)

[MaximRecoil]

A friend had told me about Gordian Knot and Doom9, so off I went armed with my new AMD 1500+ PC I just built.You hit the jackpot right off the bat. I didn't come across this place until probably a year's worth of using FlaskMPEG :( ...Mainly because I assumed that the way I was doing it was the only way.

[*.mp4 guy]

The first things I ever encoded were some trailers off of Divx.com, I had found virtualdub in the download section and had a lot of fun playing around with all the different settings. I ran out of stuff to encode really fast though, then I heard about dvd ripping the first thing I found was flaskmpeg which didn't work becuase I didn't know how to decrypt dvd's yet (I was rather baffled by the half garbled picture). Then after a lot more searching I found Xmpeg (which decrypts dvd's on the fly) Back then I only had a 20 gig hard drive and was only ripping dvds because I was fascinated about video encoding so I don't have any of my original rips. Eventually I started looking for other codecs besides Divx (after reading the entire virtualdub guide, one of the older ones with more info on codecs) and found a very early Xvid binary, it was quite buggy, but I was very impressed by the quality so I statred using it instead of Divx. While looking for more info on what all the cryptic Xvid settings did I Found doom9. I really wish I had found it sooner the information elsewhere is useless in comparison.

[Brother John]

Oh, well. The old days... :) We all used to be newbies once.

In late 2002 I bought my first and to date only DVD-ROM drive, a Toshiba SD-M1612, that turned out to have been a very good choice. Though the 60 Euros I spent seem an awful lot of money today.

And what to do with that new possession? Of course buy a DVD an start ripping and encoding ... What? There's a difference between "ripping" and "encoding"? ... I see... Oh, whatever, just google up a guide and start. Can't be too difficult ...
I had no idea!

Fortunately I stumbled across a guide using Gordian Knot – at least partly. So I did all the calculation tasks with GKnot and encoded manually via VDub. Rather complicated, but - looking back - the best that could happen. For advanced tasks handling VDub is crucial till today, and I learned it from the very beginning.

Then the tricky part began. The movie had two audio tracks, which Windows Media Player 8 played simultaneously. Funny, but not really watchable. After a lot of searching I dug up Morgan Stream Switcher, which - of course - doesn't work too well with WMP 8.
Damn!
Back to searching! Anyone remember this dual audio guide (http://www.doom9.org/dual-audio.htm)? It worked, but the Graphedit files contained absolute paths. That’s why I ended up with a movie file and a long long list of graphedit files, one per drive letter and language.
Ugly, but better than nothing.
I wasn't satisfied, though, so back to the drawing board. A little later I finally discovered a good enough solution: BS Player.

BS Player also revealed the next problem: VBR MP3. My guide assumed CBR, but already I knew that VBR was supposed to be better - for whatever reason. Of course, muxing VBR MP3 with VDub (Not VDubMod, which iirc didn't exist at that time) has its disadvantages.
Why didn't the audio of that bloody movie match the video?!
Removing one of the audio tracks didn't help. Trying different players didn't help. Re-encoding to CBR MP3 (exactly like the guide) helped.
Aha!
From there to discovering Nandub was only a short step. And finally I had it: my very first DivX-encoded movie, neatly split to CD size and working!
This movie business is not so complicated after all!
That opinion changed with the next movie, which introduced me to the world of forced subtitles...

[SBaT]

Firts DVD drive I owned was propobly that same Toshiba drive. Used to borrow from a friend some crapy Creative driver before getting my own. First backup I ever made was with the help of this forum and reading all guides here for good old divx 3.11 ;). Jumped from that to GK and nandub+SBC. Xvid development was going forward quickly so it was a natural jump try out those betas and man it was quite a few versions that I downloaded during that time. So thanks for Nic and Koepi for all those builds (and ofcourse the whole Xvid dev team). Have to browse trough some old dusty CDs incase of some olden goldies flicks.

Btw for me getting used to xvid and all the tools was an easy task compared to using avisynth and all the usefull avisynth filters. What an revelation it was to notice what all those filters where able to do for compression/noice and blocks.

[ivan_alias]

For me it was sometime late in 2001, Nandub and SBC using good old Divx 3.11. I actually screwed up the resolution and had to resize using a player to get the aspect ration correct. Apart from that the quality wasnt great. ;) 2hr 30mins film on 1CD :)

Opps, things have progressed somewhat since then!

Ivan

[unmei]

Ghost in the Shell captured from a VHS (yes i backed up the few tapes i had before starting to buy DVDs). That was in summer 2001 and i was using DivX 4 beta or alpha something - it was something with 12 IIRC, maybe 4.012 beta. I thought, if i am going to do it i want to try the latest codec. Compared to the DivX 5 encodes i did some time later, these earliest DivX 4 really look great IMO (yes i -hate- the look of DivX 5 on anime, but it took me some time to realize that ;P)

[video_magic]

I just finally made my first authored DVD! (with a menu) a couple of days ago :)

Seeing as the sources for each of the 6 titles were in different formats - *.mov , *.wmv , *.avi , *.mpg it took a while, because I wanted to do it right for a family friend. I benefitted from advice on Doom9 and numerous programs along the way, like: Avisynth, Virtualdub, QUEnc, BeSweet, Audacity, GSpot, MediaInfo, DVDAuthorGUI , God thank all the people who made these programs and all the helpful Doom9 contributers. Thanks so much guys.

[GraDy]

My first backup were "The Fugitive" (good movie btw). I did a manual VCD-rip, meaning ripped with some obsolete ripper, made a DVD2AVI project, frameserved with Virtualdub in order to get subtitles (i struggled a long time with this. I thought that you just started the frameserver and then quit Virtualdub. Couldn't understand why the subtitles weren't there :D) and then encoded with TMPGenc to PAL VCD. It looked bloody awful, worse than most VHS-tapes.
I threw away most of them, some even had a wrong aspect ratio, so everything were all stretched :D I always forgot the AR options ins TMPGenc :)

[theReal]

My first backup was Matrix - I did a VCD rip but I can't remember the programs I was using.
My first Divx backup was "Das Boot" directors cut. I used FlaskMPEG with Divx 3.11 low motion (fixed bitrate @ around 700kbit) and Windows Media Audio @64kbit. Of course it looked awful, but back then I was quite impressed :rolleyes:

[Inventive Software]

I backed up Finding Nemo that was on VideoCD to a NSV file with VP3 and MP3. Got it down to around 300 MB, with pretty good quality at the time!